Television Explorer

This service allows you to rapidly create a visual dashboard that summarizes broadcast television news coverage of your search using data from the Internet Archive's Television News Archive. Using the options below you will select the dataset to search, the kind of dashboard you want, the specific displays to include in your dashboard and the search to run.

Step 1: Dataset

GDELT Summary supports searching either global online news coverage monitored by GDELT and its global partners or broadcast television news coverage monitored by the Internet Archive. You can use the dropdown below to switch to global online news coverage.

Dataset

Step 2: Output Type

Right now, GDELT Summary only supports a single output type: a basic visual dashboard that summarizes coverage matching your search.

Output Type

Step 3: Enter Search

Enter your search keywords below. You are searching the complete raw closed captioning stream of all news programming monitored by the Internet Archive's Television Archive. Closed captioning is searched as-is as provided by each station, meaning will always be some small amount of captioning error. The Archive has monitored more than 150 stations since 2009, but has not monitored all stations for the full time period. You should carefully check the start/stop monitoring dates for your stations of interest to ensure they were monitored during the full time period of interest. Advanced users with specific needs to precisely identify any monitoring disruptions should look for the normalization baseline link on the results page above the volume timeline display or can also download the inventory files for the given days. Only programming determined by the Internet Archive to be primarily "news" in nature is monitored - all other shows, such as purely comedy or entertainment programming are excluded.

Previous versions of the Television Explorer divided broadcasts into discrete sentences and reported the number of matching sentences, but the use of sentences was difficult for many users to conceptualize and integrate with other time-based measures. Thus, the new Television Explorer now uses airtime. Each broadcast is divided into a series of sequential 15 second clips and we display the percent of 15 second clips that matched your search. Thus, a 30 minute broadcast will be divided into 120 separate 15 second clips. Note that most commercials are not closed captioned and thus are excluded from searches and so most stations will have less than 5,760 clips per day. Searches for phrases that span the boundary between two clips are counted for the first clip, ensuring there is no double counting.

All words/phrases should be in the language of the station(s) you are searching (for example, to search Univision stations you should provide Spanish keywords/phrases). This means you must conduct separate searches if you wish to search across stations in different languages. Phrases should be enclosed in quote marks and are limited to a maximum of five words. If you include multiple words/phrases all of them will be required to appear somewhere in the 15 second clip for it to match. Only the exact keyword(s) entered are searched (searching for "russia" does NOT match "russian" or "russians"). You can perform limited boolean "OR" searches by enclosing a group of OR'd terms inside a set of parantheses - for example, to search for "syria" appearing near a set of russian-related terms you might search for "syria (russia OR russians OR russian OR kremlin OR putin)". You can also put a "-" in front of a given word or phrase to exclude articles that contain it.

You can also specify one or more keywords/phrases that must appear near your main keywords/phrases, but at a greater distance than an ordinary keyword. For example, you might want to see how often "emails" appeared near "clinton" on each station. If you search for "clinton email" you will get all clips that mention both terms in the same 15 second clip. This will miss cases where "clinton" appeared in one clip and "emails" appeared in the following clip. To allow for these kinds of "context" searches, you can add context:"yourkeyword" to search for a given keyword either in the same clip as your main keyword(s) or in the 15 second clips immediately before and after the matching clip. Thus, a search for clinton (context:"email" OR context:"emails" OR context:"server") would return all clips that contained "clinton" and which also contained either "email", "emails", or "server" either in the same clip or the immediately preceeding or following clip.

Keyword(s)

TIME PERIOD: By default June 2009 to present is searched. You can narrow the timeframe to a shorter window to examine a particular time period. (You can also select a "zoomable" volume timeline display in the next section that allows you to interactively narrow your search timeframe.)

Time Period

Start Date

End Date

STATIONS: Select the stations/networks/markets to search (up to 10). Note that when selecting multiple markets you may exceed the maximum station limit when you view your results due to the number of individual stations in each market.

Stations

COMBINE/SEP: By default each station's results are reported separately in the resulting displays. You can combine the output of all of the stations into a single result to make it easier to examine the aggregate coverage of a set of networks, especially for comparison purposes.

Combine/Separate

SMOOTHING: By default, timeline visualizations will report exact values, but this can lead to a noisy graph that makes macro-level patterns more difficult to discern. To address this, you can enable smoothing that computes a moving window average to smooth the results and make patterns more apparent.

Smoothing

Step 4: Displays

Your Television Explorer dashboard is built up by appending together a series of displays and content sections. Use the dropdowns below to select which you'd like to include in your TV Explorer results summary.

VOLUME TIMELINE: The volume timeline is the most basic kind of visualization and shows you the percent of all news programming airtime on each selected station monitored by the Internet Archive over the selected time period that matched your search. It offers a quick visual gauge of how much news attention your search is receiving on each selected station. By default the timeline offers a static display, but you can optionally include a zoomable timeline that allows the user to interactively zoom into a particular period of time to see only coverage from that period (such as to drill in to a particular day where coverage of the topic peaked).

Volume Timeline

STATION CHART: The station chart shows what percent of news programming airtime monitored from each station by the Internet Archive matched your search. This allows you to directly compare how much attention each station is paying to a given topic.

Station Chart

TOP WORDS WORDCLOUD: The top 200 most relevant clips matching your search are selected, along with the 15 second windows before and after them and the top 200 most common non-stopwords are displayed, allowing you to get a sense of the kinds of words most commonly associated with your search.

Top Words WordCloud

TOP MATCHING CLIPS: The top 50 most relevant clips matching your search are displayed. You can click on any clip to jump to the Internet Archive's website to view the actual video of the clip.